When I opened my eyes, I felt Hans’s strong hand gripping my belt tightly. With his other hand, he was supporting my uncle.
I was not seriously injured, but my whole body was covered with bruises in the strangest way.
After a while, I looked around.
I found myself lying on the slope of a mountain, less than two yards from a huge, open crack in the earth.
One wrong move, and I would have fallen into that terrible abyss.
Hans had saved my life while I was unconscious, rolling helplessly down the side of the crater.
“Where are we?” my uncle asked weakly.
He looked almost disappointed that he had returned to the surface world.
Hans only shrugged. He clearly had no idea.
“In Iceland?” I asked.
“Nej,” Hans replied.
“What do you mean?” my uncle shouted. “No? Why not?”
“Hans must be wrong,” I said as I slowly stood up.
But after all the unbelievable things we had experienced during this journey, an even stranger surprise was waiting for us.
I had expected to see a mountain covered in snow and endless glaciers. I imagined we would be somewhere in the frozen north, beneath the cold light of the polar sky.
But reality was completely different.
My uncle, Hans, and I were lying on the side of a mountain that had been burned by the fierce rays of the sun.
The heat was almost unbearable.
I could hardly believe my eyes.
For two months, we had seen no sunlight. We had longed for warmth and brightness.
Now the sun was shining on us with such power that we almost wished for the darkness of the underground world again.
Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the light.
I looked around carefully, trying to correct the mistakes my imagination had made.
No matter what happened, I was convinced we must have reached Spitsbergen.
I refused to believe anything else without absolute proof.
After a long silence, my uncle finally spoke.
“Hmm… it really does not look like Iceland.”
“What if this is Jan Mayen Island?” I suggested.
“Impossible, my boy. This is not one of the northern volcanoes. There are no granite mountains or snow-covered peaks here.”
“Still…”
“Look carefully,” my uncle interrupted in his usual confident voice.
Above our heads, high on the mountain, was the opening of a volcano.
Every few minutes, it exploded violently, throwing flames, pieces of pumice stone, ashes, and lava into the sky.
I could feel the mountain shaking beneath us.
It breathed like some enormous creature, sending fire and smoke out through its giant openings.
Below us, streams of burning lava flowed down the steep slope like glowing snakes.
The volcano itself was not very tall, perhaps less than three hundred fathoms high.
But at its base was something impossible.
A huge green forest covered the land.
Among the trees, I could clearly see olive trees, fig trees, and grapevines heavy with fruit.
This was certainly not the landscape of the Arctic.
There was no doubt about that.
When my eyes moved beyond the forest, I saw a beautiful sea—or perhaps a large lake—surrounding this magical land.
It made the place look like a small island paradise.
On the side where the sun was rising, there was a small harbor filled with houses.
Boats and ships of unusual design floated on the bright blue waves.
Farther away, many islands appeared across the water.
They were so close together that they looked like a giant beehive.
Toward the setting sun, I could see distant shores on the horizon.
Some looked like beautiful blue mountains.
Others were much farther away, and above them rose a huge cone-shaped mountain with dark clouds hanging over its peak.
To the north stretched a vast shining sea.
Sometimes I could see the top of a ship’s mast or the curve of a sail moving with the wind.
The strange beauty of this scene made everything seem even more wonderful.
“Where can we possibly be?” I whispered.
Hans closed his eyes calmly.
My uncle simply stared around, unable to understand.
“Whatever this mountain is,” he finally said, “I must admit it is extremely hot here. The explosions never stop. It would be foolish to escape from the inside of a volcano only to be crushed by a falling rock outside.”
“We must go down carefully and discover where we really are.”
“And to tell the truth, I am starving and thirsty.”
My uncle was no longer thinking like the careful scientist he once was.
As for me, I had forgotten my hunger and exhaustion.
I could have stayed there for hours, trying to understand this impossible world.
But I had to follow my companions.
The volcano slope was steep and slippery.
We slid over piles of ashes and carefully avoided the streams of hot lava flowing around us.
As we moved downward, I could not stop talking.
My mind was too full of excitement.
“We are in Asia!” I shouted.
“We are on the coast of India, or perhaps among the great islands of Malaysia. Maybe we are somewhere in Oceania!”
“We have crossed half the world and reached the opposite side of Europe!”
“But the compass!” my uncle cried.
“Explain the compass!”
“Yes… the compass,” I answered uncertainly.
“I admit that is a problem. According to it, we have always been traveling north.”
“Then the compass was wrong.”
“Well, saying it was wrong is a little harsh,” I replied.
“Then we are at the North Pole?”
“The North Pole? No… no, I give up.”
The truth was simple.
There was no explanation.
I could not understand it at all.
Meanwhile, our hunger and thirst became unbearable.
Luckily, after walking for two more hours, we reached a beautiful green land covered with olive trees, pomegranates, and vines.
The fruit seemed to belong to everyone and no one.
But after what we had suffered, we were not in a position to worry about ownership.
What happiness it was to taste fresh grapes and sweet pomegranates directly from the trees.
Not far away, beneath the cool shade of some trees, I discovered a clear spring beside a patch of soft moss.
We eagerly washed our faces, hands, and feet in the fresh water.
While we were enjoying these unexpected pleasures, a small child suddenly appeared between two olive trees.
“Ah!” I cried.
“Someone who lives here!”
The boy was thin, poorly dressed, and looked frightened by our appearance.
Half naked, with dirty, tangled hair and long, messy beards, we must have looked terrifying.
Unless this place was full of dangerous criminals, we probably should not have frightened anyone.
The boy turned and tried to run away.
But Hans quickly chased after him and brought him back despite the child’s shouting and kicking.
My uncle tried to make himself look as friendly as possible.
Then he spoke in German.
“My young friend, what is the name of this mountain?”
The child said nothing.
“Good,” my uncle said confidently.
“We are not in Germany.”
Then he asked the same question in English, a language he knew very well.
The boy shook his head.
Again, no answer.
I began to feel confused.
“Is he unable to speak?” my uncle asked proudly.
He tried French.
The child only stared at him.
“I suppose I must try Italian,” my uncle said with a shrug.
“Dove noi siamo?”
“Yes, tell us where we are,” I added eagerly.
The child remained silent.
“My boy, are you going to answer us or not?” my uncle shouted angrily.
He shook the child gently and tried another Italian dialect.
“Come si noma questa isola?”
“What is the name of this island?”
“Stromboli,” the little shepherd finally answered.
Then he broke free from Hans and ran away into the olive trees.
At first, we hardly thought about his answer.
But then the meaning struck us.
Stromboli!
That single word transformed everything.
We were in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, among the ancient islands of legend.
We were on the island once called Strongylos, where people believed Aeolus kept the winds and storms imprisoned.
The blue mountains toward the sunrise were the mountains of Calabria.
And that enormous volcano rising in the south was Etna—the famous and terrifying Etna!
“Stromboli… Stromboli…” I repeated.
My uncle moved along with me, almost singing my words.
We were like two characters from an ancient Greek chorus.
What a journey!
What an incredible and unbelievable journey!
We had entered the earth through one volcano and escaped through another.
And this second volcano was more than twelve hundred leagues away from Sneffels, far from the cold and lonely land of Iceland.
The strange adventures of our expedition had carried us to one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
We had left behind the world of endless ice and entered a land of endless green.
We had escaped the gray darkness of frozen regions and returned beneath the bright blue sky of Sicily.
After enjoying a wonderful meal of fruit and fresh water, we continued toward the port of Stromboli.
We could not tell people how we had reached the island.
The superstitious Italians might believe we were demons thrown out from the underworld.
So we decided to pretend we were simply poor travelers who had survived a shipwreck.
It was less exciting, but much safer.
As we walked, I heard my uncle muttering to himself.
“But the compass… The compass clearly pointed north. This is a fact I cannot explain.”
“Then perhaps we should not explain it,” I said casually.
“That would be much easier.”
“A professor from the Johanneum Institute unable to explain a natural phenomenon? That would be extraordinary.”
As he spoke, my uncle once again became the great Professor of Mineralogy.
Even though he was half naked, wearing only his leather pouch around his waist, with his glasses still sitting on his nose.
An hour after leaving the olive forest, we reached the fort of San Vicenza.
There Hans asked for payment for his thirteenth week of service.
My uncle paid him and warmly shook his hand many times.
At that moment, even though Hans did not show emotions like we did, he allowed himself a rare display of feeling.
He gently pressed our hands with two fingers.
Then he smiled.